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The origin
of life
We perceive life through our senses
and experience. As such we live in the moment, but the
intellect bestowed upon us compels us to link together events, search out
the past, and project the future. We know ourselves to
be mortal: we have not always been around and are sure to
die. Yet something inside us refuses the notion that we are
just a temporary blip in the vastness
of
time.
Darwin’s theory of evolution gained currency in Europe
because it helped justify colonial expansion and exploitation.
It replaced the answerability of mankind to the higher
authority of God with the notion of natural selection, which
was free of moral constraints, and the idea of the survival of
the fittest justified the use of force in subjugating
so-called primitive civilisations. Darwin’s highly flawed and
speculative theory became the myth of our time, a secular
variety of religious dogma to explain away all the mysteries
of life. The mathematics of chance does not permit the
development of higher life forms by random mutation processes
in the time space available. As original creation is not a
repeatable event, the theory can never be empirically proven
and cannot lay any claim to greater scientific validity than
the creationist explanations of how life on earth first
started. We start our exploration of Islam’s outlook on life
with its account of creation, because this contains the basic
moral principles Islam teaches and wants us to adhere
to.
[Next: In search of human
potential
]
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